181–190 of 276 posts
There's several issues I've noticed as a student. First, kids are told to go to college immediately after high school. If college was high school 2.0, this would be fine. But college is completely different from high school; it's significantly more expensive, more free form and more rigorous (at least compared to most high schools). I see so many students who clearly have no clue what they want to do, why they're in…
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Once you get a license, it will pay about $125/hour. Four year apprenticeship first, though. There is a general shortage of elevator mechanics, so go for it.
maybe they should call the apprenticeship 'graduate school' in order to attract more people to it
Guarantee there exists a number such that people want to do the job. Society just doesn’t want to pay that number yet, so it’s complaining about it and dragging their feet.
There's several issues I've noticed as a student. First, kids are told to go to college immediately after high school. If college was high school 2.0, this would be fine. But college is completely different from high school; it's significantly more expensive, more free form and more rigorous (at least compared to most high schools). I see so many students who clearly have no clue what they want to do, why they're in…
That's called "adulthood."
I have posted about this on https://windowsontheory.org/2018/05/02/short-non-review-of-c... I am of course biased as a faculty (though I think his policy prescriptions would negatively effect public schools more than private universities such as Harvard), but I think Caplan's analysis is extremely shallow. First, note that if he's right, higher education should be an incredible drag on the economy - we're taking 4 hi…
>>> I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties? Working any entry level office job from age 18-22 would be a pretty good test. I would not have survived it.
This isn't a trick question. I've had two jobs for the last three years; one was sporadic, part-time, and technical, and the other was full-time horrid mostly-unskilled drudgery. I'm not sure whether or not to list the drudge job on my resume.
Maybe I'll A/B test it...
I feel like everyone is doing social media marketing - or something equally useless while the world around us is breaking down. In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the wor…
> Maybe more people should go into the trades - and not be funneled into higher education. We desperately need better infrastructure, more housing, tangible things. Not everyone is cut out for college. This is a common line of argument, but you will find that many tradesmen hope their children will go to college and get office jobs. The trades are hard on the body. Some trades are hazardous. An injury or medical prob…
I agree with you, it's a tough racket. But I think we're going to be saying the same thing about many fields and occupations in the future. Being a drone in an office is no longer secure or, in fact, healthy.
At least in a trade you're doing more than pushing paper. to each their own.
> From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? uggggh this , this market-driven bullshit that assumes "business" should be the end goal of all human behavior English classes focus on literature and poetry because maybe you should have some sense of beauty…
I don't get it, I don't understand how the author of the article has a PhD if this is what he thinks. Like, > Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? Because that literally _is_ mathematics, and the point of working through them is because students can actually understand them and learn to do the same thing with new problems. How does he expect anyone to create or discover anythi…
Also I did not spend all that much time by history or poetry in school. It is possible to select overly too many such courses I guess, but it is in no way necessary or expected.
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> In the Bay Area, in San Francisco specifically, voters allocated funds to fix or replace every single Bart escalator. The best hope we have for completing this job is 7 years. Yes you read this correctly 7 years. The problem is we do not have enough licensed escalator mechanics to do the work. Money isn't the problem. There are 35000 escalators in the US. If a typical escalator needs to be replaced every 35 years,…
If trade school were truly competitive with college and University in terms of offerings, I don't imagine the Escalator Mechanic program would require more time or work than our lower and middle-class could afford.
We’re the only family I know that don’t mind if our children go into a trade. Our friends are horrified by the idea of their children not going to a university. My daughter is going to school to be an esthetician (skin care, beauty trade). In our market the ladies that do this make their own hours and make more than their husbands.
There’s plenty of money in all manner of trades. Many older folks just haven’t caught up with how much the ROI has changed since they went to school.
The other thing to consider, the more manual and dangerous trades are done mostly by men. Female labor participation rates are about to eclipse that of men. If you want more trades the smart thing to do would be to start trying to get more women into them.
From a feminist perspective not having a degree is treated as a death sentence of dependence on a man. A lot of young gals think their only option is a university degree and we’re all familiar with how few women are getting STEM degrees.
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The answer is working fewer hours. As a society, we are overworked. We should all be pushing for shorter work weeks.
Tradespeople work more hours than anybody I know, and the unfortunate reality seems to be that they have to. Otherwise projects would take twice as long, and in the event of an emergency there could potentially be nobody to answer to it. Where I am, it's not uncommon to see an electrician or millwright working 70+ hour weeks to meet deadlines or make emergency repairs.
This is much different from my experience. I see office workers (the startup crowd especially) working crazy hours, practically living at the office, and actually bragging about it.
Meanwhile, most trades jobs are unionized. So you might be working long hours in an emergency, but you're getting paid time-and-a-half at least. Outside of emergencies, you get to punch the clock, and leave work at work.
Seriously?
Yet another attack on the liberal arts that misses the point of education entirely. An education in a variety of fields is about what it means to be a person in a world among other people and the natural environment. It's what makes democracy possible (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10858.html). If we reduce education to mere employment training, we might as well revert to medieval feudalism where your entire life is bound to your economic production.